


Captive Audience

by mangomunkki



Category: Guild Wars 2 (Video Game)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:20:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26111776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mangomunkki/pseuds/mangomunkki
Summary: Sage and Passio are captured, locked in an uncomfortably chilly jail cell and left to await their fate.
Relationships: Sage Morreale/Kärsimyspassio
Kudos: 6
Collections: Commander Firnüel





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> so, I just wanted to hurt Sage and Passio a little. scratch that, a lot. this isn't canon, so I can (unfortunately) run wild with it.

Their captors show up sometime during the second day, apparently growing bored with keeping them in the basement and not doing anything with them – or, more likely, growing nervous about keeping two members of Dragon’s Watch captive, painfully aware of the ticking time bomb they were and how it’s just a matter of time before the rest show up to bust them out. At least, that’s the gist of the joke Sage cracks as soon as they hear the door opening. Armoured footsteps near the cell they’ve been locked in, the torchlight from the doorway casting shadows that reach the door long before their owners do. Passio steps up to the cell door, side by side with Sage, who is all but craning his neck, trying to see who’s coming.

The same mage from before strolls into view, hands linked behind his back like he is out enjoying a nice walk in some noble’s garden, not in a corridor lined with prison cells. With him are four guards, two of which are carrying some weird spears – the design looks asuran, with its geometric shapes and patterns, but sized up for a human. The mage halts in front of their cell, meeting Sage’s glare head on, unfazed. “Gentlemen, I’m going to have to ask you to step back from the door.”

Passio shakes his head, squaring his shoulders at the exact same time Sage opens his mouth, retorting with a sharp ‘no’. The mage simply sighs, spreading his hands in a what-can-you-do gesture, closing his eyes. “Ah, and here I was hoping we could do this civilly. Michael, if you would?”

He motions at one of the guards, who steps up to the cell, pressing a button on his spear that makes an uncomfortably sharp ‘click’ noise. The glyphs along the shaft are lit, the yellow glow spreading from them to the grooves on the tip, accompanied by an electric buzz as a spark runs up the entire length. Passio eyes the weapon with disdain, as if daring it do do its worst. He’s been struck by Brand lightning before, no way could this be any more painful.

The tip of the weapon makes contact with the centre of his chest, and as his vision flashes white, he realises he has to reassess that thought. He falls back despite himself, hand flying up to clutch at the injured site as he brings in breath, hearing Sage’s “Passio” from somewhere too far away. He stabilises himself, hand still on his sternum and Sage’s on his shoulder as the mage keeps fucking talking.

“Potent little things, aren’t they? The asura designed them to herd giants, originally. On full power, the electric power in them would be enough to stop a human’s heart with the lightest tap. Luckily for us, no such risk when using it on a sylvari. You people don’t have hearts, do you?” The question is conversational, not that he would’ve responded to it in either case, but Passio can feel Sage’s hand on his shoulder tighten.

“So what is it you’re after then? Information? Because if that’s the case, that’s another thing the sylvari don’t have.” Passio’s eyes flick to Sage, incredulous, as he opens his mouth, taking a step forward and halfway blocking the mage’s line of sight from him. “You see, I’m the Commander’s right hand. Useful to have a seasoned soldier for that, hm?”

Sage is lying through his teeth, Passio knows, as there are no such things as ‘right hands’ in Dragon’s Watch, and even if there were, there’s no question such title wouldn’t go to Zaya. He blinks, realising what Sage is trying to pull, and opens his mouth to protest. He’s silenced by Sage squeezing his shoulder where his hand is still resting, almost painfully tight. He can just about imagine the hissed ‘play along’ he would get in a more ordinary situation, the command he’s grown to expect with sudden bluff. Passio can see the mage’s grin widening as he laughs aloud, apparently swallowing Sage’s lie, hook, line and sinker.

“Why yes, that is indeed… useful. Why don’t you and I have a little chat, mister…?” Another guard unlocks the cell door, after shooting a suspicious look at Passio, evidently expecting him to rush out. Sage nods, spreading his hands and stepping out.

“Sage. Just Sage.”

He’s handcuffed as soon as his feet touch the floor of the hallway, the guard wrenching his hands back with painful efficiency. His eyes lock with Passio’s for the briefest of moments, and he mouths something he’s not quite able to grasp. Before he can repeat himself, he’s pushed to move forward, and led out of Passio’s sight.

Passio swears out loud, kicking the cell bars and making them rattle. So _typical_ of Sage, to volunteer himself just to spare Passio some pain. He has no illusions what the ‘chat’ will actually entail, he’s not a bright-eyed sapling. He just has to hope they’ll keep on believing Sage’s lies.

Time passes.

Passio isn’t quite sure how much – there’s no window in the tiny cell, so no way would he be able to track the sun’s path. He can hear a clock ticking away somewhere, but discovers quickly it’s ticking out of sync. Some seconds last for three, some are skipped entirely. When he strains his ears, trying to hear anything to gauge what’s going on, he thinks, for a moment, he can hear Sage scream. He dismisses the thought quickly, pushing it out of his head – this is his mind playing tricks on him, the haze of worry mixing with the dullness of the drug they’d injected them with trying to convince him of the worst. He knows what Sage can handle, he’s seen him take an abomination to the chest and rise back up laughing. No way would he be screaming, not with anything these people could do to him.

After an agonisingly long wait, he can hear the door to the prison corridor open again, casting a thin ray of light to the floor. He stands up, backing up against the wall enough to show he’s complying – for now, he _really_ doesn’t want to get hit by that electric prod again if he can help it, and he’d need to discuss an escape plan with Sage first before enacting it. As Sage comes into view, flanked by two guards, he’s suddenly grateful for the wall against his back. He can see the pain in the tightness of Sage’s posture, in the stilted gait he’s gained since they last saw. He can _smell_ the blood.

One of the faceless guards unlocks the door after checking Passio’s far enough away he wouldn’t be doing anything stupid. The other pushes Sage in, and even with Sage turning back to complain about the ‘rough treatment’, Passio would have to be deaf and blind to miss the flinch that had followed the guard touching his back. As the door slams shut, Passio rushes to Sage, who remains close to the doorway, leaning against the cool stone wall. “Hi, Paz.”

He can feel emotions furling up inside him, anger and worry in equal measures as he closes the distance between him and Sage, who has still yet to move from where he was pushed to. Passio draws in a breath, proceeding to immediately choke on it as his glow reaches Sage’s features, highlighting the damage done to him. He stumbles, grabbing onto Sage’s arms as they reach out to steady him. As he guides him to sit down, Passio goes willingly, hands flying up to cup Sage’s face, turning it this way and that.

He’s had the scar over his eye for as long as Passio’s known him. It was the only thing ‘marring his statuesque face’, as Sage had once so eloquently put, always red and angry against his tanned skin. Now, the scar pales in comparison, almost lost under the blooming mass of red and purple that is the right side of his face. Passio trails a shaking hand along Sage’s jaw, where a particularly nasty gash shoots up, splitting his lip and ending just short of hitting his eye. Sage winces at the contact to the wound, eyes flickering shut for a moment. “Paz, please, it’s –“

“Who did this, Sage?” Passio doesn’t recognise his own voice, the way it’s so hoarse it’s almost a whisper. Sage shakes his head in response, dislodging Passio’s hand from his cheek.

“Paz, listen.” Sage fixes him with a stern look, or at least something he probably thinks is stern – right now, though, all Passio can see are the creases around his eyes, their tightness revealing exactly how much pain Sage is in. “It looks worse than it is, all right? Just… keep that in mind.”

Passio hisses at him, feeling the urge to punch him just to get him to knock this ‘tough guardian’-bullshit off. He stays his hand, of course, because now is _not_ the time, and besides, he can still smell the fresh blood on him. He has to find out where that is coming from, and hopefully, try to stop it. He can see no big wounds on his front, the fact that Sage isn’t wearing a shirt anymore raising bile in his throat. “Sage, turn around.”

Sage’s eyes widen as he swallows, paling even further. He raises his hands in front of him and shakes his head, whole torso suddenly going tense. “There’s no need, honestly, Paz, I’m fine –“ His sentence is cut off when Passio grabs ahold of one of his wrists, fingers wrapping around just above the bright red ring circling Sage’s wrist, where the skin has scuffed and something unyielding – probably metal, or maybe rough leather – has dug into the sensitive skin. He blinks, trying to calm himself, but the bright purple spreading further into the room is a good indication on how well that goes. “Sage. Turn. The Fuck. Around.” His voice is barely audible, not even to his own ears, but somehow, Sage hears it. He nods, hesitantly, and turns around, his back finally visible to Passio.

Passio isn’t quite sure which deity to invoke first.

He’s spent hours memorising the layout of Sage’s back, as it, along with his arms, was one of his favourite features of the man. He’s trailed his fingers around the divots and hills of muscles, kissing his way from one mole to the next, teeth teasing at the sensitive skin of Sage’s neck, he’s dragged his fingers down that back so many times he’s lost count. He could describe his back with his eyes closed, a picture-perfect image in his mind. He _knows_ what it should look like. The scene in front of his eyes is… the absolute last thing it should look like. Passio sucks in air through his teeth, unsure what to even focus on.

The entirety of Sage’s upper back is covered in angry, red lines. They cut across from one side to the other, forming a net-like pattern, crossing over each other and not sparing an inch of his skin. Some of the marks are deeper than other, a crisp red line instead of a fuzzier one, and some are even bleeding, the crimson escaping from them slowly trailing down towards Sage’s waist. Littered among the whip marks are inflamed, red circles that are almost sunk _into_ the skin, and Passio, unfortunately, knows exactly which tool causes those burns. Passio reaches out to touch the wounds, catching himself just before his fingers can make contact. If the marks are even half as painful as they look, touching them is the last thing he should do. His hand trembles where it’s stopped midair, and he draws in an equally shaky breath.

“Paz?” Sage’s voice, somehow so _fragile_ , snaps him out of his shock. Passio shakes his head, a growl forming in his throat as he turns around to seek for the waterskin and a somewhat clean cloth.

“I’m going to kill them. Every last one of them.”


	2. Chapter 2

Evening rolls around, judging by the faint purple illuminating the jail cell, and thankfully, Passio has been given time to clean up the mess that is Sage’s back. He can see the pain he’s in and curses their luck, because of course their captor is a mesmer, capable of nullifying Sage’s magic and thus cutting off his access to any kind of magical healing. Sage takes the rough scratch of the cloth and water on the injured skin like a champion, the only indications he feels it at all being his laboured breathing and the occasional hiss escaping between parted teeth whenever Passio moves on to a new wound. Passio knows he has to get the wounds clean, otherwise they’ll get infected and that’ll be an even worse situation, but still, it hurts him to cause even more pain for Sage. He grits his teeth, eyes flicking to the dark corridor. He has, unfortunately, no escape plan to speak of.

The cell they’re in is pretty damn solid, no weak spots he could exploit, and the lock is asuran magitech, impossible to pick. Passio thinks he could _maybe_ get it open from the outside, with a proper heaping of the explosive paste Dramma had insisted he carry with him, and possibly a few well timed whacks from the business end of his staff. Such thoughts are useless, though, considering he’s lacking both his equipment and a way to get outside in the first place.

“A pretty shit situation we’re in, huh, Paz?” Sage has, apparently, followed his gaze to where he’s been staring holes at the cell door for the past minute or so. Maybe, if he keeps it up, he can glare the door open. Sage didn’t call it ‘the murder look’ for nothing, after all. Upon hearing Sage’s voice, however, Passio drops his eyes to him, relieved to at least not _hear_ his pain in his voice anymore. Sage’s skin is still covered in a sheen of cold sweat, a testament to how much he’s had to endure during today, and he’s swaying even where he’s sitting. He should be out already, sleeping to regain his strength – for what, he’s not sure himself, but he has a hunch it’s going to be needed – but of course Sage insists on staying awake to keep him company. Passio shakes his head, a groan escaping his throat.

“’Pretty shit’ is a very conservative way to put it. It’s fucking weird, too. We still have no idea what they’re even after.” As he glances at Sage, he sees the look in his eyes, the look that he gets whenever he’s thinking of whether to say something or not. “Or do we?”

Sage sighs, burying his face in his hands by reflex, wincing back when his palm hits the fresh bruises on his face. “ _Shit,_ when will I learn those are there? Anyway, yeah, sorry, forgot that part was in his me-only monologue. Pretty rude of him, actually? You’d think it were easier for him, too, if he gave us the important info when we’re both there to hear it.”

“Sage.” He’s stalling, it’s plain as day, but right now, Passio doesn’t have the patience for it.

“They’re after Aurene.”

Passio scoffs, incredulous. “Aurene? The twenty-foot tall, prismatic Elder Dragon? You know, the one that can blink and encase you in crystal?”

Sage nods.

“Yeah, that’s the one. They’re fanatics, I mean, that much you can tell even without knowing the details. He babbled on and on, but the gist of it is, they want to kill all the Elder Dragons, apparently ‘freeing the Eternal Alchemy’ or something of the sort.” He does air quotes, seemingly very unimpressed. “Can’t remember the details of their plans, given I was a bit… preoccupied when those were being talked about. Don’t think they really know, either, yet. They’re trying to get the location of Aurene’s lair from us, or at least, that’s what they were digging from me.”

Passio swallows, his throat suddenly very dry. Of course. Of _fucking_ course there is another fanatic group, an asura/human split this time, that are after the Dragons.

Aurene’s lair’s location has been kept secret, the precise coordinates known only to the Dragon’s Watch, and even then, entry is tricky, to say the least. The floating castle in the sky is obscured at all times with Aurene’s illusions, her prism deflecting the light away so to anyone looking for it, they’d see nothing but blue skies. Passio hates visiting, because of the mindfuck-aspect of the castle just suddenly being there after hours of not seeing anything, having to just trust the mounts to know their way in. Without Bory there to guide them in the first time they went, Passio has no doubts he would’ve never found the entrace.

Shit, _Bory_. If these people know Sage and Passio are part of Dragon’s Watch, no way is Bory’s involvement unknown, either. Not to mention, they don’t exactly blend in with the generic crowd, especially after they’d started glowing bright blue. Passio swears under his breath, hands gripping his arms. He just has to hope they won’t be an idiot, to try and get them out by themselves or something. If their magic is nullified, they stand no chance against the amount of bodies this splinter group commands, and he doesn’t want them in this kind of situation, ever again.

Sage’s arm is a comforting weight where he lays it on his shoulder, squeezing tight before pulling him closer to himself. Passio’s eyes flutter shut at the feeling of Sage’s lips on the top of his head, relaxing his upper back as he lets himself rest against Sage’s chest.

“It’s a shit situation,” Sage sighs, resting his chin on Passio’s head. “But we’ll get through it, all right? One day at a time. No way they’ll take long tracking us.” Passio can hear the genuine spark of optimism in Sage’s words, a quality he seemingly never loses, and something he can really appreciate at times like this. Passio hums in response, letting his eyes close.

“Yeah. One day at a time.”

They get until the next morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a quick breather before I get back to hurt. what can I say, I'm a slut for exposition.


	3. Chapter 3

Passio doesn’t get much sleep during the night, unsurprisingly. He can hear the drip-drip-drip of condensation dropping from the ceiling, and mixed with the irregular clock, the sound is downright infuriating. He tries his best to block it out and sleep, he knows he really _should_ , but the stress of the situation and the anger mix in equal measures, ending up in a cocktail that keeps him staring at the door, unwilling to relax. This is not a safe space, not a location where he’d even want to relax – after all, letting down their guard is probably exactly what their captors want of them.

Passio’s hand is squeezed tighter, Sage’s grip on it flexing as his brow furrows in his sleep. Passio leans down, a thumb wiping over the creases, and Sage thankfully relaxes to the touch. He’d taken a long time to fall asleep, too, equally wary of sleeping in these circumstances, but his exhaustion had eventually won the fight. Sage is curled up on the floor next to Passio, still gripping his hand, and Passio really can’t bring himself to tear it away. He’s repositioned himself slightly, sitting between Sage and the cell door, a determined jut in his shoulders. His time to look over him, now. He’d be damned before he took away the chance for Sage to rest and recuperate a bit.

The sound of a lock clicking open rouses them both awake. Passio rolls his shoulders, falling asleep sitting really didn’t agree with his spine at the best of times. Sage is stirring, too, pushing himself to a kneeling position, trying to hide the wince at having to move. Passio feels a flare of sympathy, the stiff muscles of Sage’s upper back all but screaming their pain, but he moves along from that quickly, turning the sympathy into anger. He knows these people will probably come for him next, having wasted yesterday on trying to get information out of Sage. His free hand balls into a fist, nails digging into his palm.

Having seen what they’d done to Sage, no way is he going to go quietly.

The mage walks in again, a sickeningly pleased smile on his features, and Passio thinks he’s going to be sick with the sudden anger flooding him. This _bastard_ is the reason Sage can barely draw a breath without wincing in agony, he’d put all those marks on his skin and for what? His mad delusions? Or for his thirst of power? It always comes down to power with these people, doesn’t it. Passio draws his hand from Sage’s, standing up before he has a chance to grab him again, squaring his shoulders. Bodily standing between the guards and Sage might not do much good, not if they really wanted to try him, but _fuck_ if he’s just going to meekly go along with their plans. And he’d snap every single bone in their bodies, if it means they wouldn’t touch Sage.

Sage pushes himself to his feet, the jut of his jaw defiant, and his hands don’t even tremble where he rolls his shoulders. Passio flicks a glance back at him, an ‘are you sure’ in his eyes he doesn’t dare voice aloud. He gains nothing but a curt nod back, his attention drawn to the mage, spreading his arms as if addressing long-awaited visitors.

“Ah, my friends! A new day rises, and with it, so shall we.” His eyes trail to Sage for a moment, widening for a moment before he seemingly composes myself.

“Oh, and good morning to you, too! It seems you are no worse for wear, good man.”

“Yeah, your accommodations were most gratuitous,” Sage shoots back, an easygoing grin audible in his voice, lying coming to him naturally as always. “And after such a riveting talk yesterday, how could I expect any less from today?”

“Ah, about that.” The mage tilts his head, a smirk tugging at his lips that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “I think I’ll actually borrow your companion for today. If you don’t mind.”

From the corner of his eye, even in the dim light, Passio can see Sage blanch. He realises then, that Sage had been planning on taking the pain for this day too, and would curse him if he could spare the time to do that. Where would his protective streak end? _It doesn’t_ , whispers an errant thought, and Passio has to agree with it, as infuriating as the fact is.

Before Sage can open his mouth again, Passio steps one step closer to the door, meeting the mage’s cloudy eyes head on. His lip curls in a sneer, registering the guards moving closer to the door, one of them holding a key stone. “Picking me, then? I’d like to see you _try_.”

The second he can hear the beep signalling the lock is open, he darts forward, imbuing his step with every ounce of natural speed he can muster. With years of experience, he knows exactly how to angle his shoulder to ram the door open despite the guard’s hand still on it, the heavy metal giving way under his frame easily enough. A surprised shout rings out from one of the guards, and he can see them fumbling for a proper grip on their spears, but he doesn’t care, they’re not his target. He whips out of the doorway, locking eyes with the mage once again. He can feel an electric sensation in the air, knows he’s readying a spell, but he will not give him the chance.

Feet light on the stone hallway, Passio lunges at the mage, his elbow connecting with his face with a satisfying ‘crunch’. The electric feel of the air disappears as the mage falls back, clutching at his face, his false smile gone.

“Grab him!” the mage yells, his voice shrill and nasally thanks to the clearly-broken nose, something Passio can’t help but feel pretty damn pleased about. How’s that for a prisoner, huh? He doesn’t have time to revel in the sensation for long, though, there are still four guards to take care of. He twists on his heel, recalling the position of the guard nearest to him, already planning how to take them down, and hopefully get that spear to function as a makeshift staff.

A scream cuts through the air.

Passio would know that voice in his sleep. He whips around, suddenly rooted on the spot, as he realises the error he’d made, dismissing the guards. In his normal state, two regular humans would be nothing for Sage, unarmed or not. Right now, though, without his magic and his entire upper body flayed open, they can and have overpowered him.

Sage is kneeling on the ground, his arms gripped behind his back by one of the guards, while another is holding an activated electrospear inches from his skin. Sage’s chest is rising and falling rapidly, the exertion coupled with the electric shock having brought him to heel. Sage’s eyes, frighteningly bright, lock with Passio’s and widen as his head shoots up.

“Behind you!”

The warning comes only a second too late, as Passio feels two speartips press against his body, one between his shoulderblades, the other at the dip of his lower back. The electric shock has him falling to his knees despite himself, body curling in on itself to protect itself from the pain as he screams, fingers scrabbling at the ground.

After a few agonisingly long seconds, he can feel the metal lifting off his skin and just slumps on the floor. He can just about fight to get his head up enough to look at Sage, who is all but tearing himself out of the guards’ grip, face panicked.

Passio can hear a click of heels to the right of his head, the mage’s voice issuing orders strangely muffled – probably a side effect from being hit with that much electricity at once, he assumes. Two pairs of gauntleted hands grab onto him, dragging him off, and he fights to keep up eye contact with Sage for as long as he can. The anger and powerlessness mixed in his eyes breaks something in Passio.

Passio is half-carried, half-dragged up a flight of stairs and down a narrow corridor lined with doors. In the end of the corridor there is the biggest door of all of them, of heavy oak and with dark iron panels adding weight to it. The creak it makes when pushed open rings in his ears, and Passio decides immediately this is not a door he’s a fan of. No nice doors make such menacing sounds, he’s pretty sure.

The room the door leads to isn’t much better. It’s circular, rather big, and smells absolutely revolting. Passio has always had a good sense of smell, and it’s usually an advantage, but as the metallic smell of the room attacks his sinuses, almost making him gag, he desperately wishes he couldn’t smell it quite as clearly. He’s no idiot, he knows exactly what causes that sweet, iron-like smell, and for it to be this heady, so seeped into the room, there has to have been hundreds of litres of blood spilt in this room. _Some of it Sage’s_ , his brain pipes up, and he likes this comment even less than the previous one.

His limbs are still refusing to cooperate, so him kicking up a fight as he’s tied to a sturdy oaken chair is ridiculously useless. The guards’ helmets mask their faces, but he’s pretty sure they’re laughing at him, his blows glancing off of their armour with such ease it doesn’t even hurt him, let alone them. He growls, regardless, immediately trying to wriggle his way out of the restraints as the guards back away. The thick, worn leather and heavy clamps do their job, barely budging under his efforts, and he sags, gritting his teeth.

Passio’s eyes track around the room, taking in the heavy arsenal of torture gear littering the walls. He can see multiple racks of pokers, whips, a couple of maces and an awfully large selection of pliers. A rack stands off to one side of the room, and to the left of it, a thick, wooden cross, with leather restraints still hanging off of it, the splattered blood around it redder than the brown layer elsewhere in the room. Passio feels his throat tighten, his mind making the connection faster than he’d like it to.

A purple figure in the corner of his eyes has his attention switching back to the door, abandoning his information-collecting in favour of keeping an eye on the mage. His nose is back to normal, now, clearly magically healed, but Passio can still see the blotchy red mess the developing bruise is forming on his face. Good. Serves him right, at least Passio won’t be the only one hurting here – because he will be hurt, of that he has no illusions. He just has to try to stretch it out, play for time.

“Ahh, and here we have the little troublemaker.” The mage’s clearly trying for the cheery demeanour he flaunted earlier, but it’s undercut by the obvious anger still in him. Passio meets his eyes, cocking a brow. Do your worst. “Are you quite ready to behave yourself, now?”

“Are you quite ready to _make me_? Or, you planning on talking me to death?”

The backhand comes swiftly enough to actually catch Passio off guard. He curses himself as he groans, head whipping to the side with the force of the blow, and he can taste the sweet blood-sap in his mouth. This _bastard_. Teaches him to underestimate a mesmer, though.

Passio gathers a moutful of blood-sap, spitting it in the mage’s direction. He jumps back, but Passio takes great pleasure at seeing he wasn’t quite quick enough – some of the gold got on his shoes, the splatter reaching up to his ankles. He doesn’t have time to focus on the sensation of glee for long, though, because a rough hand is in his hair and twisting and pulling and it _hurts_.

Passio goes along with the pulling motion of the hand, mostly to ease the pain, and ends up face to face with the mage, who is now reddening from anger, the last traces of civility gone as he snarls. “Listen here, you smug, overgrown artichoke. Do you think we don’t have the means to hurt you, huh? Is that it?”

Behind him, Passio sees a guard reach to one of the shelves on the wall, picking up a particularly nasty-looking whip, one that seems to be made of liquid metal, if such a thing is possible. It glints in the torchlight, reflecting the orange glow, and Passio finds a sudden bit in his stomach. That looks like like it’d hurt. The mage follows his eyes, crooning.

“Ohh, do you like that one? It _is_ rather effective, I admit… It drew the most noise out of your companion yesterday, after all.” Passio thinks he’s going to be sick. “Unfortunately, all we got out of him were lies. So, I’m thinking of something very different for you.”

Passio isn’t quite sure where to look, to the first guard, or the other, who’s seemingly busy by the fireplace. He settles on staring the mage down, baring his teeth in challenge, feeling the trickle of blood-sap down the side of his chin. A metallic clank from his left has his eyes flicking to the side, the bit in his stomach growing to a size of a small boulder, as his eyes lock on the gleaming, red-hot embers gathered up in a brazier. Oh no. Oh, no no no.

The mage picks up a poker from the brazier, the iron almost white in how hot it is, and tests its weight. “Well then, shall we? You know, we can still do this the nice way. Just give us directions to the Crystal Dragon, and you can both be on your way.”

Passio growls at him. “Go to hell.”

“Ah, well.”

The burning metal sinks into the skin of his inner wrist, and the white hot pain has his eyes rolling back. He’s not quite sure if he screams or not.

Sage can’t sit still, no matter how much his back would appreciate it if he did. He paces around the small jail cell, rattling at the bars, kicking at the walls, trying to find any kind of way out. He feels the nonstop panic swirling in his chest, a whirlwind which hasn’t stopped since he lost eye contact with Passio. The worry for him mixes with the heady rush of humiliation at having been used as a simple pawn, hurt to get Passio’s attention elsewhere. It was such a basic technique, and yet, it had _worked_. The look on Passio’s face when the twin spears had been jammed in his back is something Sage sees every time he blinks, and will probably be for a while, still.

Sage grits his teeth, slamming a fist into the wall. He hates being so _powerless_. He’s used to being the shield, the one taking the hits for others and fixing up injuries. Devoid of his armour, his weapons and his magic, Sage can do nothing but offer up his own body to shield Passio’s, and yet, even that hadn’t been enough. He feels a bitterness at the back of his throat, his mind offering up about twenty different scenarios that could be going on in that hellish room right now, and he’s equally unable to stop any of them from happening.

The voice of the mage whispering into his ear what he’ll do next in-between whip strikes, the unflinching _curiosity_ as he pondered what would happen to a sylvari body compared to a human, the carousel of horrors as his eyes first rounded the torture room, they all spin in his head uninhibited. Sage brings his hands up to his face, covering his eyes for a moment while he takes a deep breath, ignoring the burning in his back and sides at the action. _Not_ the time. He’d have to get them alive out of here, first, then he could fall apart. Luckily, the past years have taught him to be quite good at postponing processing terror.

The door slams open at the end of the corridor, and Sage is by the bars faster than he would’ve thought possible. His breathing stutters as he sees the two guards walk in, dragging a limp form between them. His eyes are nailed on the figure, unmoving, only jostling in sync with the guards’ steps. Grenth take every single being in this fortress, _what_ have they done to him?

Sage rushes towards the door by instinct, screeching to a halt as one of the guards brandishes an electro-spear at him, intent clear. He backs up a step, two steps, hands held up – no way does he want to risk any kind of altercation with them, not as long as they hold Passio. The guards work the door open, toss Passio in unceremoniously, and no sooner has the lock clicked back shut is Sage by his side, gathering him into his lap.

He is breathing, if shallowly, chest rising and falling and eyes fluttering under his lids. He looks _off_ somehow, and it takes Sage a good few seconds to realise why. His heart stops as he puts together the odd lightness of Passio’s head, and the forest fire -like smell lingering in the jail cell.

“No, no they didn’t.” The sentence comes out a mere whisper, Sage suddenly desperate, turning Passio’s head around. He feels like he could keen at the sight. Passio’s gorgeous, beautiful, thick hair is barely half the length it used to be, the ends curling in themselves, charred and limp. The ferns around the crown of Passio’s head are scrunched up, crumpled up in unnatural angles, like someone had dug their hand in and grabbed a fistful. Sage forces himself to swallow before he throws up, closing his eyes while he takes a few deep breaths.

The _savagery_ in laying a hand on sylvari’s ‘hair’ is something he should’ve expected from the mage, in retrospect, but told-you-so’s aren’t going to be of much help in this situation. Still breathing artificially steadily, Sage grips Passio tight in his arms, burying his head in his shoulder. The faintest whiff of passionflower fights its way past the choking, ashy smoke, and Sage feels the corners of his eyes burn as the first tears hit Passio’s skin.

“I’m so sorry, Paz.” I failed you.


End file.
